Published

Writing is hard. At least it is for most people I know. It’s really hard for me at least.

Not because I spend hours upon hours contemplating the beauty auf phrases, the choice of the perfect rhythm of words and syllables. I’d love to be that person, to be so invested into the texts I write, to spend my days in a capoeiraesque mix of dance and duel with language culminating in a perfectly crafted sentence of beauty. I envy poets who can work on texts in that way, making them better – if just a little bit – in every little iteration. But the things I write don’t work like that. The emotion characterizing so many texts of (sometimes horrible) beauty eludes me1.

My brain is full of ideas which I cannot get onto “paper”, cannot write down. This used to happen when things needed more thinking, more reflection or just more conversations and opinions. Not being able to write things down has helped me a lot in the past to make a little less of an ass out of myself.

We are at a very interesting cultural point right now. Digital technologies are starting to devour more and more established structures of tradition, organisation and power replacing them with mostly intransparent new systems. Of power. But with a slightly changed group of dominant mainstream. We’ve seen the subculture of hackers and makers to transform from the cultural underdog to being the mainstream. Not in number but in influence, cultural relevance. It’s no coincidence that half the movies coming out these days are based on the comic books our new technical elite has been growing up with.

But it’s hard to integrate political values that people have been fighting for for decades if not centuries and the kind of ideology that is dominant in tech circles these days. It’s hard to position oneself when it comes to companies fighting governments on taxes, regulation, encryption. When terms such as “freedom” are so watered down and hollow that they mean nothing more than a semiotic toy for logic nerds trying to legitimize hate speech as valuable.

I wondered if I was burned out. That getting into the same debates again and again had just grinded me down. And there surely is part of that. So many debates, whether they are about encryption or privacy have been reduced to two, maybe three dogmatic black holes sucking everyone up and reducing any form of nuanced debate to a snarky pissing contest about who can create a click-baity campaign more efficiently. Cat GIFs, online petitions or the constant threat of terrorism, in the end it’s all the same. Mechanisms to shut debates down. Mechanisms to shut people up.

Because in the end that’s what politics is. People talking. And I feel like we have largely stopped doing it. I also largely stopped doing it.

And it’s been eating at me for a while.

Because the amount of things that need debates and exchanges and arguments is piling up. The mountain of unasked questions and unattempted answers is growing with every day. And every day it seems to become more threatening, less conquerable. And that feeling has been draining me. Making me feel like it’s too much to get to anyways. I did mostly shut up.

Which is sad. Not because I am oh so brilliant but because while thinking here loudly, I realize that I know quite a lot of people who share my situation. Who stopped contributing for many different (and often very understandable) reasons. We are losing so many voices, experiences and positions. Due to scaring people away. With violence (and discrimination, sexism, harassment, etc are violence and nothing less). By turning arguments into pissing contests and digitally amplified shouting matches. No wonder only a few hardened people in intellectual bunkers “survive”.

I wanted to restart writing and publishing again for a while and I couldn’t. Every word, every letter fought me. Laughed at me. And I gave up. Drafts of ideas kept piling up and still pile up in my website backend. So I thought I’d try this. Just write this stream of thoughts on writing to cheat myself into actually nailing words to this white page. To hit publish even though these words are mostly pointless from an intellectual standpoint.

This is a text without an argument or point. Without a new idea or project. But it’s here and published. And I hope that that can be the start of something again.